Gray Ghost Murders (9781101606070) by Keith McCafferty

nerve to come back and ask for it. He knew Lothar would rip his throat out.” She clicked her fingers and the shepherd bounded out of the truck.
    â€œRip his throat out?” Stranahan said.
    â€œAs in kill the motherfucker.”
    â€œYou sound dangerous to be around.”
    â€œNot as dangerous as Julie Godfrey.”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œJulie Godfrey. She’s the wife of that asshole we were looking for when Lothar found the body. You didn’t hear?”
    Stranahan shook his head.
    Katie reached down and scratched Lothar’s ears. “You’re anxious to go, aren’t you boy? Let’s get going. I’ll tell you up—”
    The shepherd barked, then bolted from Katie’s feet and raced up the trail.
    â€œWhoa!”
    The dog abruptly obeyed, but his nose was still pointed away. His whole body quivered.
    â€œHeel.” In three seconds Lothar was back at Sparrow’s feet, his head bowed and his tail down.
    â€œBad dog.” And to Stranahan. “It’s all in the tone. That counts more than the words.” She spoke to him in a tone that said he was the one who had chased the cat up the tree, not the shepherd. For that was what had happened. Lothar had treed a large, long-haired cat that was now peering down at them with alarmed eyes from twenty feet up a Ponderosa pine.
    â€œHow the hell did a cat get out here?” Stranahan said.
    â€œâ€™Cause somebody got tired of him and didn’t have the guts to pull the trigger. So they drove him up here and threw him out. It happens every day. Get tired of your cat, throw it to the coyotes. Get tired of your dog, throw it to the wolves. That’s folks for you. That’s why I stick with animals.”
    She directed her speech at the shepherd. “Except for you, lover. A Class Three ought to know better than to chase a cat. You’re in the doghouse.
    â€œCome on,” she said to Stranahan. “Let’s get up there before the sun gets too hot. That cat’s not going to come down until we’re gone.”
    This early in the summer, the path up the Trail Fork of Bear Creek was a slog, requiring four creek crossings in the first two miles. It was cool and misty in the timber as Sean and Katie navigated puddles looking at their boots, while the shepherd, chastised, obediently followed at Sparrow’s heels. Lothar’s tongue was hanging out by the time they reached the trail junction in the big meadow from which a hiker has his first glimpse of the Helmet’s red pinnacle, and farther east, bulking immensely against the skyline, the limestone extrusion that is the Sphinx.
    At the junction, Sean and Katie took the 326 trail to the left, which ascended in switchbacks for another three miles before reaching a saddle between the two great mountains. To the right of the saddle, a shoulder of the Sphinx rose in a series of small benches to the timberline, above which the slope inclined steeply toward the peak. It was on one of the upper benches, grown over in scattered pines and strewn with great rocks, that the grizzly had unearthed the first body. The crime scene tape had torn in the night wind and was strung across the ground.
    â€œSpooky, isn’t it?” Stranahan said. They were sharing one of the sandwiches he had made and swapping swigs of iced tea from Katie’s Nalgene bottle.
    â€œNah, it’s just woods.” Katie released the drawstring of her pack and extracted the metal detector. She pressed a keypad and pointed the four-inch-diameter coil at Sean’s jaw. The detector buzzed, picking up the fillings in his teeth.
    â€œYeah,” Stranahan said, “but can it find a bullet buried in a tree trunk? I thought these things could only isolate metal if it was buried shallow, a few inches under the ground.”
    â€œWell, you figure the bullet makes a hole going into the tree, right? Unless the tree healed up, you’d have a clear path to the